Beyond the school gate: Children’s views on road safety and active mobility in Cluj-Napoca, Romania

Background

Children are active navigators of urban environments yet are rarely included as co-producers of road safety evidence. Participatory methods remain underused in urban public health research, particularly for school-age children beyond early childhood. This study applies the Mosaic Approach, a child-centred framework, to explore how children perceive active mobility and road safety on their daily school journeys.

Methods

A participatory qualitative study was conducted in 2025 across 10 schools in Cluj-Napoca, as part of the FIA Foundation-funded Safe Journeys to School. Following teacher training, four sequential activities were implemented with 194 children aged 7–16: perception mapping, safety zone mapping, child-led tours of school surroundings, and an imagination exercise. 10 focus groups with 77 children aged 15-16 were also conducted. Outputs — maps, spatial annotations, and narrative statements — were coded inductively, with themes emerging directly from children’s contributions across five domains: infrastructure, safety behaviours, emotions, traffic participants, and transport alternatives.

Results

Children are knowledgeable of their surrounding space. While active mobility was widely desired, it was constrained by structural barriers. Children proposed specific, feasible urban interventions without prompting — 30 km/h zones, car-free school zones or school streets, dedicated cycling and scooter lanes, and additional school buses. Younger children (7–10) focused on emotional safety and visible authority; older participants (11–16) proposed systemic, legislative solutions.

Conclusions

The Mosaic Approach is an effective and transferable method for generating policy-ready urban road safety evidence with school-age children up to age 16 years, extending its documented application beyond early childhood. The focus group findings strengthened validity across age groups.

Key messages

• Structural barriers, not individual choice, limit children’s active travel to school; pedestrian safety requires urban design solutions, not behaviour change.

• With given structured tools, children generate specific, feasible, policy-ready recommendations — from 30 km/h zones to car-free school streets — practical and usable without further translation.